Creepy

Believe it or not, the photo above depicts not a fictional Hollywood supervillain but the real Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, which meets, famously, every winter in the tony alpine resort village of Davos, Switzerland.

The gathering draws the world’s richest and most powerful elites – tech oligarchs, billionaires, media titans, celebrities, top corporate executives, heads of state, royalty, high governmental officials, central bankers, and representatives from prominent international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including but not limited to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The Pope has even been known to get into the act!

The days-long event also clogs up the local airport with carbon-spewing private jets, this despite the WEF’s constant apocalyptic harping about “climate change”!

The first speaker to kick off this year’s festivities, albeit remotely, was Xi Jinping, the authoritarian ruler of the People’s Republic of China, followed in short order by none other than “Mr. Science” himself, the irrepressible and omnipresent Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Earlier, at its 2014 gathering, Schwab had laid out his modest vision for the planet’s future, which involves marshalling the force of Davos’ elect movers and shakers to, in effect, hit a “reset button” on global affairs. This “Great Reset,” detailed in his chilling 2020 book of the same name, is a large-scale blueprint for building a new world order – to “save the planet,” of course.

This reset would involve what he calls the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (the title of his 2017 book), itself a thorough reordering of social and economic norms. This revolution admits that not only have free markets failed, but democracy as well.

In short, our new technocratic age demands a new global alliance, a blue-ribbon coalition of enlightened, “objective” leaders (such as he) to enact “collectivist” solutions to the world’s critical and wholly unprecedented challenges.

For too long, he insists, we have allowed our individual freedoms and self-indulgent, short-sighted decision-making to thwart necessary progress. Our approach has been both wasteful and inefficient (he is German after all!). Worst of all, we’re destroying the planet!

In The Great Reset, Schwab argues that because of the inherent deficiencies within the democratic system, we, the little people, simply cannot know what’s best for us. Thus, we must yield our blinkered individualism to the ordered beneficence of our technocratic overlords, who alone are trained and equipped to lead us into the emerging brave new world.

But how exactly are we to get there? In his 2020 book, he openly admits that the Covid crisis has created a unique opportunity to help facilitate things, to radically alter our outmoded social attitudes and economic policies.

In late 2019, before the actual pandemic, he had argued that effecting this new world order would be impossible without some sort of global crisis, be it manufactured or of unfortunate happenstance. What was needed is a crisis that would shock society to its core.

Echoing Nostradamus, the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored two “gaming” events at Johns Hopkins University, in 2018 and again in October 2019, to simulate a fictitious pandemic, dubbed Clade X. Both symposia, Clade X and Event 201, spun a few likely outcomes of such an outbreak:

As lamentable as such a crisis might be, Schwab, in his 2020 book (i.e., after the fact), welcomes the Covid outbreak for creating an ideal environment for instituting necessary change, something utterly unthinkable in normal times. Especially noteworthy, he argues that the Covid pandemic is but the warmup to the main act – climate change. It is this “existential threat” that will require a full-scale implementation of the Great Reset in order, rightfully, to save us all.

The benefit of a crisis, you see, is that it allows our self-assured visionaries to “build back better,” to fashion a veritable utopia from the ashes of catastrophe. Such a thing is simply not possible absent the cataclysmic. [And in case you’re wondering, the Biden administration did not come up with this phrase – Schwab and the World Economic Forum did. Not coincidentally, it has been adopted by a number of governments worldwide.)

Which brings me to the Christian doctrine of sin. While today’s elites may indeed wield unprecedented wealth and power, that they would seek authority and privilege for themselves at the expense of others is hardly new. It’s as old as the hills, in fact.

Then again, I’m among those who agree with T.S. Eliot and others that all societies require a ruling class. The question is what kind? Does it address the needs of the people or not? Does it rule well or poorly?

Unfortunately, the greatest temptation of any ruling class is to assume superior wisdom and insight. With great wealth and power, whether earned or not, comes the tendency to ignore human fallibility.

Yet, to state the obvious, no one person or group is free from sin’s effect. If anything, being part of any grouping tends to magnify individual failings, as personal responsibility yields to groupthink. Indeed, for the elites there is the very real danger of becoming cloistered, inbred, and incestuous.

But because the elite class tends to exempt itself from such common failings, it routinely thinks itself somehow impartial, morally and intellectually superior, and thus uniquely positioned to rule the masses who are, it is believed, woefully inadequate, helpless, and venal. Ironically, it’s often just the opposite.

Which is why modern democracies hold the greatest hope for humanity. In a true democracy, input is solicited from all citizens, not just the high-flyers at the “top.” For no one person, or group of persons, can comprehend the fullness of life’s infinite complexities. To think otherwise is delusional. Which is why the U.S. Constitution wisely limits power, with checks and balances that seek broad consensus. [Spoiler alert: our current ruling class hates this.]

When the United States, and the West in general, opened up trade with the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s, the stated hope was that the freedoms of the West would rub off on that entrenched communist nation. Trade would transform its notoriously closed-off society as more and more Western ideas were introduced and implemented. Western democratic ideals were destined to prevail!

Ironically, the exact opposite seems to have happened. Instead, the Davos crowd, the world’s ruling elites, seem enamored with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.

They marvel at how Xi Jinping’s authoritarian government has whipped China into shape, transforming a previously dirt-poor nation into a technological and economic powerhouse. Just look at the gleaming airports! they say. In contrast, that is, to a decaying JFK or LAX!

Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about all those pesky citizens interfering with what needs to get done. The way he cuts through red tape is a marvel to behold! Democratic process, on the other hand, is slow, plodding, and simply not up to the job. After all, what does the average citizen know about what makes a 21^st century world buzz and hum?

In his latest book, The Dying Citizen, historian Victor Davis Hanson points to the very first example of democracy, ancient Greece, and argues that it was premised on the existence of a free yeoman class of self-sufficient farmers.

In today’s parlance that would translate to the working and middle classes, those sufficiently independent to determine their own destinies without undue deference to the ruling class, and its ancillary cohort of white collar “laptop” professionals and the multiplicity of pliant worker bees laboring away within the administrative, bureaucratic state.

This is the very group that today’s ruling class wishes to abolish. The underclass has been bought off and is almost entirely dependent on the government. Not so the working and middle classes, at least historically, who, because of their independence, tend to offer greater resistance to elitist rule.

It’s hard not to notice how much of what we see in today’s politics seems directed at suppressing or cancelling this group. They are the last holdouts for freedom and individual choice. And it is they alone who stand in the way of the elites’ plan to build heaven on earth.

To the Davos crowd, these holdouts are simply standing in the way of progress. They’re preventing what all intelligent, educated people know needs to be done. How else to save the planet? No, they must be silenced lest they crimp the style of our global elites and prove stubborn in resisting the Great Reset’s messianic mission.

So, to recap, perhaps its not all that surprising that the lead-off speaker this year in Davos was none other than Xi Jinping.